Tomorrow, the Killing by Daniel Polansky

imagine your father would have liked him to do the same.’ The longer the conversation lasted the more it was becoming clear I was not the ideal candidate to reconcile the Montgomery family, never having had a family myself, nor entirely understanding their purpose.
    ‘You say you knew my brother.’
    ‘I said that.’
    ‘How well?’
    ‘How well does anyone know anyone?’
    ‘Did you think him the sort of man to end his life face down in the gutter, outside of a Low Town whorehouse?’
    ‘I’ve known better men who died worse.’
    That was close enough to an attack to allow her temper free reign. ‘You can tell Father I’m not some child to get fetched by the help. You tell him I’ll stay in Low Town till Roland gets justice, since he’s not man enough to see it done himself.’
    As she turned to walk away I closed the tips of my fingers around her wrist. ‘Let me tell you something about the dead, as someone who’s seen a few of them. They don’t care what we do. They don’t yearn for vengeance, and they don’t hope for redemption. They rot.’ I tightened my grip slightly. ‘Stick around Low Town and you’ll find out I’m right.’
    She ripped her arm away with enough force that I worried she might have injured herself. Then she shot me a look that could have curled paint, and stalked off into the night.
    I finished the rest of my drink and told myself to stay out of it, knowing I’d be too stupid to listen.
7
    R oland Montgomery’s birthday party was not my kind of scene.
    This was a year or two after the armistice. I was a low-ranking agent, investigating crimes and punishing the guilty, or at least the unlucky. Roland was amongst the most beloved heroes of the Great War, and the Association rapidly becoming a political power. That ought to have been enough to mitigate against our continued interaction, even without the differences in our upbringing and social status. I suppose Roland’s willingness to try and forge a friendship despite them was to his credit. But virtue and vice often walk hand in hand, and I sometimes wondered if his sense of egalitarianism wasn’t an offshoot of his consuming love of being liked.
    In later years, in my professional capacity as a purveyor of phantasms and herb-induced bliss, I would find myself in any number of upper-class debaucheries, half-orgies populated by the degenerated scions of the aristocracy. This was about as far from those as you could get. General Montgomery was old school, and though Roland’s politics now ran to the radical, personally he was as little taken with revelry as his father. I suspected that this celebration was not of his making, that if his wishes had been taken into account the day would have come and gone unmarked.
    A white canvas tent had been erected in the backyard, a term that hardly does justice to the virtual nature preserve that was the Montgomerys’ grounds. The late spring evening was illuminated by white lanterns hung amidst foliage. The weather had been kind enough to go along with the proceedings, the night warm, the sky clear. A pleasantly bucolic scene, though the chattering of the insects was largely drowned out by the chattering of the guests. Waiters shoved trays of over-elaborate pastries into my face, diced quail spleens with candied almonds, goose liver dabbed atop thin-cut white bread, things that looked like food but somehow weren’t quite. I got the sense that no one else was having a particularly good time, but then they’d all had more practice in faking it.
    The young Rouender woman with whom I was nominally conversing had spent a good deal of money to look very cheap. She wore little in the way of clothing but a great deal of make-up, along with a selection of jewelry that weighed enough to drown a man in a gutter. Her name was Buffy or Minnie or some other jarring diminutive more appropriate for a child’s doll than an adult. I’d long since stopped paying attention to her words, but their gradual